Blender

Blender is a cross-platform computer program, especially dedicated to modeling, lighting, rendering, animation and creation of three-dimensional graphics. Also digital composition using the procedural technique of nodes, video editing, sculpture (includes dynamic topology) and digital painting.

The program was initially distributed for free but without the source code, with a manual available for sale, although it later became free software. It is currently compatible with all versions of Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, Android, Solaris, FreeBSD and IRIX.

History

In 1988, Ton Roosendaal co-founded the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo, which quickly became the first largest 3D animation studio in the Netherlands and one of the most prominent animation houses in Europe. NeoGeo created award-winning productions (1993 and 1995 European Corporate Video Awards) for large corporate clients such as Philips. At NeoGeo, Ton was responsible for both art direction and internal software development. After careful deliberation, Ton decided that the current 3D tool used in the NeoGeo studio was too old and bulky to maintain and update and needed to be rewritten from scratch. In 1995 this rewrite began and was destined to become the 3D creation software we now know as Blender. As NeoGeo continued to refine and improve Blender, Ton realized that Blender could be used as a tool for other artists outside of the NeoGeo studio.

In 1998, Ton decided to create a new company called Not a Number (NaN) derived from NeoGeo to promote the market and develop Blender. At the base of NaN was the desire to create and distribute a compact and cross-platform 3D authoring suite for free. At the time, this was a revolutionary concept as most commercial modeling programs cost thousands of dollars. NaN hoped to bring a professional level modeling and animation tool within the reach of the general public. NaN's business model was to provide commercial products and services around Blender. In 1999, NaN attended their first conference at the Siggraph in an even bigger effort to promote Blender. The first Siggraph for Blender convention in 1999 was a huge success and generated enormous interest from both the press and convention attendees.

In the wings of the great success of the Siggraph, at the beginning of the year 2000, NaN obtained financing of 4.5 million euros from investors. This large contribution of money allowed NaN to rapidly expand its operations. Soon NaN boasted over 50 employees working around the world trying to improve and promote Blender. In the summer of 2000, Blender 2.0 was released. This version of Blender integrated a game engine into the 3D suite. At the end of 2000, the number of registered users on the NaN website exceeded 250,000.

Unfortunately, NaN's ambitions and opportunities did not match the company's capabilities or the market reality of the time. This oversizing of the company led to a restructuring creating a smaller company (NaN) and with new funds coming from investors. Six months later, NaN's first commercial product, Blender Publisher, was released. This product was targeted at the emerging market for 3D interactive media based on web environments.

The Blender interface allows great customization.

Due to disappointing sales and the continuing difficult economic climate, the new investors decided to terminate NaN's activities. This also included stopping the development of Blender. While there were clearly flaws in the current version of Blender, with complex internal software architecture, unfinished features, and an unusual user interface, the great help from the community and customers who have purchased Blender Publisher in the past caused Ton could not allow Blender to disappear into oblivion. Since relaunching a new company with a large enough team of developers was not feasible, in March 2002, Ton Roosendaal founded the non-profit organization Blender Foundation (Blender Foundation).

The first goal of the Blender Foundation was to find a way to continue the development and promotion of Blender as an open source project based on the user community. In July 2002, Ton managed to get a "yes" for the Blender Foundation to carry out their plan to make Blender open source. The "Free Blender" he had to raise EUR100,000 so that the Foundation could buy the rights to Blender's source code and intellectual property from NaN investors and subsequently release Blender to the open source community. With an enthusiastic group of volunteers, including several former NaN employees, the 'Free Blender' campaign was launched. To everyone's delight and surprise, the campaign reached the goal of €100,000 in just 7 weeks.

On Sunday, October 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL). Blender development continues to this day led by a team of volunteers from around the world led by Blender creator Ton Roosendaal. In fact, Blender has been held to the "GNU GPLv2 or higher" intentionally not upgrading to GPLv3, in the absence of benefits.

Suzanne as 3D model

Suzanne, the "pet" monkey

By January-February 2002 it was clear that NaN could not survive and would close its doors in March. However, they released one more version, 2.25. As a sort of easter egg, and last personal tag, the artists and developers decided to add a 3D model of a chimpanzee's head, although in the software it's known as &# 34;monkey". It was created by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen (SLiD3), who named it Suzanne after the orangutan in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Suzanne is Blender's alternative to more common test models like the Utah Teapot and the Stanford Rabbit. A low-polygon model with only 500 faces, Suzanne is included in Blender and is often used as a quick and easy way to test materials, animations, rigs, textures, and lighting settings. It is also frequently used in joke images. The biggest Blender contest awards a prize called the Suzanne Award.

Relevance in the industry

Image of the Blender interface.

Although a relatively new tool, it has found acceptance by many independent animators and small studios (particularly for TV commercials). In blockbusters they have not yet used it to generate final CGI (as seen in the cinema or on television), but they have used it in intermediate stages. Below is a list of projects that have used it professionally:

• On February 18, 2010, the first animated feature film was released in full with free software, using Blender as a main tool; this is Plumni, project that is driving the development of Blender even more, especially at the level of animation and management of large-scale libraries.

• It has been used in movies, such as Spider-Man 2to preview scenes (Screen-Board Test). It's also been used in the Marvel movie, Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

• There are some more proposals taken to production and integration with graphics using Motion Track, such as "Friday or another day", which is of the first cases of its use along with 35mm film.

• It has been the main tool in projects, made with participation of various Blender users and led by Ton Rossendaal, such as the short film Elephants Dream. These projects serve as experiments on their capabilities, providing this experience to other users.

Features

Yafrid conference at a free software congress.

• Multiplatform, free, free and with a really small size of origin compared to other 3D packages, depending on the operating system in which it runs.
• Capacity for a variety of geometric primitives, including curves, polygonal mesh, vacuums, NURBS, metaballs.
• Along with animation tools, inverse kinematics, armor or grid deformations, load vertices and static and dynamic particles are included.
• Audio editing and video synchronization.
• Interactive features for games such as collision detection, dynamic and logical recreations.
• Versatile internal rendering possibilities and external integration with powerful lightning tracers or free "raytracer" such as kerkythea, YafRay or Yafrid.
• Python language to automate or control several tasks.
• Blender accepts graphic formats such as TGA, JPG, Iris, SGI, or TIFF. You can also read Inventor files.
• Integrated 3D game engine, with a logical brick system. For more control, Python language programming is used.
• Dynamic simulations for softbodiesparticles and fluids.
• Apilable modifiers, for the application of non-destructive transformation on meshes.
• System of static particles to simulate hairs and furs, to which new properties have been added among shaders options to achieve realistic textures.
• Capacity to make Match moving.

Image of Suzanne, part of help in the program.

Graphic Engines

Blender is intended to render, or draw, 3D scenes, ultimately generating a 2D image. This representation is done by graphics engines, which can be of various types. Blender comes by default with three pre-rendering engines and one real-time engine.

The three of pre-rendering can be divided into two realistic (oriented towards the creation of images with a photorealistic aspect) and one of rendering by hand. The two realists are the so-called 'internal engine', which is the original Blender engine and is still selected by default when you first run the application, and Cycles, which is a more recent engine and based on Blender. light ray tracing. As of version 2.67, Blender incorporated a new graphics engine (FreeStyle), focused on creating strokes that simulate hand-drawn drawings. The real-time graphics engine is based on OpenGL, and Blender uses it both for editing the 3D environment (through the editor called '3D View') and for its game engine ('Game Engine').

But in addition to those graphics engines, Blender makes it easy to create a workflow with other external ones. To do this, the scenes can be exported to these other engines. But there are also add-ons that allow you to work in Blender using those engines as if they were integrated into Blender.

Internal

This is the original Blender graphics engine. For simple scenes, it creates renders faster than Cycles. But it requires more effort from the user to obtain photorealistic looking results when the scene is complex. From version 2.80 onwards this engine was removed.

Cycles

It was introduced in Blender version 2.61. It is a graphics engine based on light ray tracing. And, more specifically, it is based on a technique known as BRDF. It is designed to make creating photorealistic images easier. But it creates images with more noise than the so-called 'internal engine', and the rendering time is longer (at least for simple scenes, although it can be improved with the use of compatible graphics cards). As of version 2.70 it has volumetric rendering, and as of 2.71 it has the system to render smoke and fire.

In version 2.79, the Cycles engine adds features such as Denoising, which filters the resulting image using information (known as render passes) collected during rendering to remove noise while preserving visual detail. It can be rendered at 10 samples, for example, greatly eliminating noise. This makes the Cycles render engine really fast and with good quality. It also incorporates Shadow Catcher. The PBR Shader node, Filmic Color Management and much more.

One of the great novelties of Blender since version 2.65 is the inclusion of the Open Shading Language (OSL). OSL has been developed by Sony Pictures Animation as a Shading language for modern path-tracing in graphics engines like Arnold or Cycles. OSL is in constant development, and its use can be seen in the Arnold graphics engine used in movies like The Amazing Spider-Man, Men in Black III, and Hotel Transylvania, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, The Smurfs 2.

FreeStyle

This graphic engine allows you to create strokes that simulate hand-drawn drawings. It was introduced in Blender version 2.67. It is not designed for any type of drawing in particular, but it has a large number of parameters that allow you to configure a large number of drawing styles. You can see several examples, in very different styles, in the 2.67 release notes.

Although we consider it a separate graphics engine here, since the type of rendering is completely different from Blender's other two graphics engines, FreeStyle interacts with those other two engines. It was originally integrated only with the internal engine, and has not been integrated with Cycles until Blender version 2.72. The advantage of this integration is the possibility that lighting (including shadows), created by Cycles on each object that FreeStyle uses to render strokes, can influence the rendering of those strokes. Also, from an interface point of view user, FreeStyle is not selected in the same dropdown as the internal, Cycles or the game engine, but must be activated in the Freestyle panel of the Render of editor type Properties.

Physical simulations

Rigid bodies

In versions prior to version 2.66, you could use Bullet in Blender's game editor, but to use it in the modeling editor you had to "record" a simulation made in the games. Sergej Reich, through the GSoC program in 2012, integrated Bullet into the Blender modeling environment. That work was added to the official version of Blender in version 2.66. And he himself has continued that work in GSoC 2013, although as of September 30, 2013 that work has not yet been added to any official version of Blender.

On the other hand, bashi created the Bullet Constraints Tools plugin, which is useful when working with fractional objects; makes it easy to create "constraints" and is used to change, at the same time, properties of several selected objects. In addition, Scorpion81 published, on March 1, 2012, an add-on with which you could fracture Blender objects, and later turned it into a Blender modifier; As of September 30, 2013, he has released several patches to add that modifier, but it has not yet been included in any official Blender version. Based on those 2 plugins, Jonathan-L created 4 video tutorials on creating object breaks, each one of them focused on a material: wood, glass, cement and ceramics.

Deformable Solids

Fluid physics simulation

Simulation of deformable solids can be done by defining 3 types of objects: "Collision", "Cloth" or "Soft Body". Those of type "Collision" modify the shape, when colliding, of both those defined as "Cloth" (for fabric simulation) and those defined as "Soft Body" (for simulation of soft and hollow objects). In both cases, the simulation is only carried out taking into account a surface without thickness; to simulate the deformation of solid objects, other applications should be used, such as OpenFOAM.

Since version 2.70, the simulation of rigid bodies can affect the simulation of soft bodies, and vice versa; that is, both types of simulation can communicate with each other behaving as a single simulation.

Fluids

Countryscape with buildings designed with Blender.

For version 2.40, Nils Tuery added a simulation of fluids using Lattice Boltzmann methods. In addition, fluids can be simulated using particle systems; using the smoothed-particle hydrodynamics method. But this other way has the drawback that it still doesn't create, at least easily or automatically, a contour mesh of the fluid.

Smoke

Smoke is simulated with "Smoke" configuring one object as a "Flow" emitter, another as a "Domain" and optionally a "Collision". The emitter can be configured to simulate smoke from its own geometry or from the trajectory of a particle system. In addition, you can choose between simulating only smoke, smoke and fire, or only fire; all of this is available in the internal render engine and since version 2.71 also in Cycles Render, where rendering can be customized from the node editor.

Development

Since Blender was released under the GNU GPL v2 license, it has undergone significant changes to its initial codebase, as well as the addition of new features.

These changes have included a revamp of the animation system, modifications to the stack based system, an updated particle system (used to simulate hair and fur), fluid dynamics, dynamic simulation for softbodies, support for GLSL shader in the game engine, advanced UV mapping (texture mapping).

Parts of the developments that were carried out on the Blender software were carried out within the framework of Google's Summer of Code program, in which the Blender Foundation has been a participant since 2005.

Support

Blender is documented in detail on its website, the rest of the documentation can be obtained through the community via tutorials and internet discussion forums. Blender Network provides support and social services for professional Blender users. Additionally, there are various video tutorials on YouTube that can be useful for both novice users and professional users, at no cost.

Books

The Blender online store offers the official books of this foundation and a selection of the best third-party copies, to name a few:

Books published by the official Blender Foundation:

• Blender GameKit 2

Books produced and published by third parties:

• Art of Blender
• Blender Master Class
• Mastering Blender, 2nd edition
• Game Character Creation
• Blender for Dummies 2
• Introducing Character Animation, 2.5 edition
• Blender Studio Projects

Version and event history

Branch 1.0

In this stage the first commercial versions of blender are developed, new versions of Blender are developed for other operating systems, in June 2000 Blender becomes totally free software.

• 1.00 - January 1995 - Development of Blender in the animation study NeoGeo.
• 1.23 - January 1998 - SGI version (IrisGL) published on the web.
• 1.30 - April 1998 - Version for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, is provided for OpenGL and X.
• 1.3x - June 1998 - Creation of NaN.
• 1.4x - September 1998 - Version for Sun and GNU/Linux Alpha published.
• 1.50 - November 1998 - First handbook published.
• 1.60 - April 1999 - C-key (new features need to be unlocked, $95), the Windows version is released.
• 1.6x - June 1999 - Version for BeOS and PPC published.
• 1.80 - June 2000 - End of the C-key, Blender is completely free again.

Branch 2.0

• 2.00 - August 2000 - Real-time motor and interactive player.
• 2.10 - December 2000 - New engine, physics and Python.

Branch 2.2

In March 2002 Ton Roosendal, the original author of the program, founded the Blender Foundation in Amsterdam, in charge of continuing the development of Blender and promoting its use, who is the current CEO of the Blender Foundation.

• 2.20 - August 2001 - Character animation system.
• 2.21 - October 2001 - Blender Publisher launched.
• 2.2x - December 2001 - Version for Mac OSX published.
• 13 October 2002 - Blender becomes an open code, first Blender Conference.
• 2.25 - October 2002 - Blender Publisher is again available free of charge.
• October 1, 2002 - The experimental branch of Blender, a test site for programmers, is created.
• 2.26 - February 2003 - The first version of Blender being open source.
• 2.27 - May 2003 - The second version of Blender being open source.
• 2.28 - July 2003 - The first of the 2.28x series.

Branch 2.3

Various tools are added and many improvements are made.

• 2.30 - October 2003 - At Blender's second conference, the 2.3x interface is presented.
• 2.31 - December 2003 - Update to version 2.3x interface, as it is stable.
• 2.32 - January 2004 - Great review of the internal render capacity.
• 2.33 - April 2004 - Environmental Inclusion, new Texture procedures, the game engine has returned!.
• 2.34 - August 2004 - Great improvements: Particle interactions, mapping LSCMUV, functional integration of YafRay, folds compensated in Superficis Branch, Inclination Hat (Ramp), complete OSA and many more.
• 2.35 - November 2004 - Another version full of improvements: Object hooks, curve deforms and curve tapers, particle duplicators and much more.
• 2.36 - February 2005 - Error correction version, the only purpose of this version was to stabilize the 2.3x series. Addendum: Normal Maps.
• 2.37 - June 2005 - A big breakthrough: transformation tools and controls, Softbodies, Force fields, deflections, incremental Subdivision Surfaces, transparent shadows, and multi-layer rendering.

Branch 2.4

In September 2005, the production of the short film Elephants Dream began, finished on May 24, 2006, it was observed that animation projects absorbed a lot of the Blender Institute's time, so in the summer of 2007 Ton Roosendal established the Blender Institute, to have an independent institute in charge of animation projects. The Blender Institute presents on April 10, 2008 the short film Big Buck Bunny and in November 2008 the video game Yo Frankie!

• 2.40 - December 2005 - A major advance: rewriting of the skeleton system, shape keys, skin with particles, fluids and rigid bodies.
• 2.41 - January 2006 - Mainly added to the game engine and corrections.
• 2.42 - July 2006
• 2.43 - February 2007
• 2.44 - May 2007
• 2.45 - September 2007 - Error correction version.
• 2.46 - April 2008 - Improvements in the short film project Big Buck Bunny.
• 2.47 - August 2008 - Error correction version.
• 2.48 - October 2008 - Improvements made in the open game project Yo Frankie!.
• 2.48th-November 2008 - Error correction version.
• 2.49 - May 2009 - Updates on games, textures, python, nodes, among others.
• 2.49th-June 2009 - Repaired problems with DV-AVI files.
• 2.49b- September 2009 - updated Python API, game engine documents and error correction.

Branch 2.5

Sintel and Scales, two characters from the film Sintel

Development begins on December 24, 2009 and reaches stable version 2.57 on April 13, 2011. On February 18, 2010, the Argentine studio Manos Digitales Animation presents the feature film Plumíferos. On September 27, 2010, the Blender Institute finished the short film Sintel (Durian Open Movie).

• 2.50 Alpha 0 - December 2009 - alpha version developed in conjunction with the DURIAN project.
• 2.50 Alpha 1 - January 2010 - first alpha version developed in conjunction with the DURIAN project.
• 2.50 Alpha 2 - March 2010 - second alpha version - bug correction and better stability.
• 2.53 Beta - July 2010 - This version is called "beta" because it is now to complete the function of most. The main theme that is still working on the Python API, user interface improvements, modeling, system animation, physics simulation and render.
• 2.54 Beta - Between 2.53 and 2.54 there was an extensive renamed operation has changed the API command sequence much, with repercussions also for the load of 2.53. Mix with animation in 2.54.
• 2.55 Beta - Correction of errors.
• 2.56 Beta - December 2010 - Test and search for errors.
• 2.56a Beta - January 2011.
• 2.57 Stable - April 2011.
• 2.58 Stable - June 2011.
• 2.58th Stable - July 2011.
• 2.59 Stable - August 2011.

Branch 2.6

Notable new features were introduced in this branch, specifically:

• 2.60 - Codification FFmpeg, Peper branch:Sound 3d & 2010 node project.
• 2.61 - Cycles render engine & Motion/camera tracking.
• 2.62 - Boolenas & UV Tools.
• 2.63 - BMesh.
• 2.64 - 3 October 2012: This version improved Blender for the Mango project (whose purpose was to make the film Tears of Steel), integrating branches and patches since 2011. The aim was to create a complete "VFX pipeline", with "motion tracking" using "planar tracker", a better management of green funds (Green Screen Keying) and a mask editor. In addition, color management was improved (OpenColorIO was integrated), new nodes, sculpting masks, the modifier 'Skin Modifier', Bsurfaces v1.5 were added.
• 2.65 - December 10, 2012: The fire simulation was added to the smoke simulator. Custom node support using Open Shading Language. Improvements in the 'bevel' tool. Improvements in 'decimator'. Etc.
• 2.65th - December 19, 2012: Bug correction.
• 2.66 - February 21, 2013: Support to sculpt with "dynamic topology". Bullet integration into the editing and animation system. IU improvements. Rendered hair using Cycles. More improvements in the 'bevel' tool. Improvements in the transparency of images. Improvements in some modifiers, and was added the 'Laplacian smooth' modifier. Improvements in the physics of characters within the game engine. Improvements in fluid simulation. Improvements in COLLADA support. Etc.
• 2.66a - 6 March 2013: Bug correction.
• 2.67 - 7 May 2013: Added a new rendering engine, Freestyle, for rendering non-phorerealist (it imitates handmade drawings). The system of painting and spitting, with brushes now common for both modes, improved the motion tracking system, which is now faster thanks to the use of the Ceres library. Performance improvements were added to the node composition system. They added tools to facilitate the creation of 3D models to print. Now you can create nodes using Python, and there are also other improvements in the usability of the nodes editor. Scattering subsurface was added to the Cycles engine. Some tools of the mesh editing mode were improved. Several additions were improved. And a lot of bugs were corrected.
• 2.67a - 21 May 2013: Bug correction.
• 2.67b - 30 May 2013: Bug correction.
• 2.68 - 18 July 2013: New modeling tools were added, as well as improving existing ones. Improved performance, Cycles, Windows and GPU's. The motion tracking editor now allows you to automatically place markers with new tools. The quality of the rendering of smoke was improved, reducing the visibility of "blockiness". Security was also improved when opening files.blend, as with this version the user can decide whether to open them will run, or not, the Python scripts containing (if you trust their origin). And a lot of bugs were corrected.
• 2.68th - 24 July 2013: Correction of 14 bugs.
• 2.69 - 30 October 2013: In terms of modeling, the boiling was added BisetTo cut meshes in half, the tools were improved Bridge, Edgenet fill, Grid fill, Symmetrize and Lattice, and the modeling was improved with parametric curves. In the part of Cycles, the hair rendering, from subsurface scattering and from heaven, new nodes were added for the composition of the final image, and the integrator non-progressive, now called Branched Path, now you can run on GPU. In the motion tracking editor, it is now easier to replace flat objects, such as posters. And many bugs were corrected, in addition to other improvements.

Branch 2.7

The beginning of this branch coincides with the beginning of the first feature film produced by 'Blender Foundation', called Gooseberry.

• 2.70 - 20 March 2014: In Cycles, volumetric rendering was added and hair and texture performance improved. In motion tracker improved functionality plan tracking and added support for tracks, markers, weighted. In the modeling of meshes, there are two new modifiers (for laplacian deformation and to show mesh as a wire), other modifiers were improved, and the usefulness 'knife' was improved. Several improvements were made in the GUI, the most visible being the introduction of tabs to group panels. In the game engine, there is now support for detail levels. At the inner level, the graph of dependencies of a scene is now multi-hilo, which means that its performance is better the more cores the computer processor has. In the composition part, the use of masks was improved. As for physical simulations, now the simulation of rigid solids takes into account the deformation of the meshes during simulation. And there have been more improvements, including the correction of about 560 bugs.
• 2.71 - 26 June 2014: In Cycles, you can now apply motion blur to objects that are deformed (which also includes cases such as hair or grass), renders fire and smoke, and now also has baking API. In animation, you now have new types of interpolation, based on easing equations; as an example, a case of use is a ball that will stop throwing. To paint, there is now a new HSL color wheel, and new icons for the shoots. You can now sculpt in constant detail (independent of 3D view) when using dyntopo. As for the game engine, logical blocks can now be deactivated when they are editing (it is edir, in the mode of editing games), animations are multi-hil (a thread per object), materials whose sole purpose is to project shadows, and supports an unlimited number of action layers. As for Freestyle, you can now create textures for strokes. And there have been many more improvements, including the correction of more than 400 bugs.
• 2.72 - October 3, 2014: Cycles now supports volume rendering, and SSS, in GPU. The user interface now has the menu option Piece; to use them, the user has to activate the plugin (add-on) corresponding. As for modeling, a tool has been added to make intersections in edit mode (Edit Mode). The workflow of texture painting has been modified in such a way that access to painted images, and UV layers, is easier. The image composer now has a node to create light rays (Sun Beam). Freestyle NPR can now be used together with Cycles. And there have been many more improvements, including the correction of many bugs.
• 2.72nd - 15 October 2014: Correction of 48 mistakes.
• 2.72b - 21 October 2014: Correction of 18 mistakes.
• 2.73 - 8 January 2015: Several updates on Cycle Rendering, improvements and new features, support for GeForce GPUs 9xx. New full screen mode, improvements to Pie Menus, The 3D View can now show the background of the world. Knife-tool that now allows intelligent cuts by hand raised, and more improvements were made in selection tools, Bevel modifier and shapekeys. The development of the UVs was improved, resistance is now enabled for Grab and Snake Hook brushes, the visual feedback mode improved to paint with masks. Sequencer can now show a backdrop, strips can be matched with others along with other improvements. Freestyle NPR Rendering has a new SVG exporter add-on, along with other improvements. Grease Pencil had an important update, it is now possible to edit and encourage blows! New design styles and improvements in the user interface. The Collada Importer was updated, improving compatibility with the bone concepts of another software. Complements: FBX improved the import/export of armours, might need some plugins that update some changes to Python API! As usual several other upgrades and minor improvements, and a lot of error fixing also in this version.
• 2.74 - 31 March 2015: Improvements to the Cycles engine, such as a new node for the material editor, added, among other characteristics, Occlusion of environment (Ambient Occlusion) and depth of field (DoF) from 3D view, support for custom normalities, a great advance in the physics of particles, improvements in memory consumption in the Freestyle engine, among other characteristics.

Branch 2.90

• On 31 August 2020, they announced the release of version 2.90. [5]

Supported formats

Blender can read and write many file formats, ie renderable or 3D models. Blender's default Format is File Blender.blend (.blend).

Two-dimensional formats

• Images
  • Windows Bitmap (.bmp)
  • DirectDraw Surface (.dds)
  • Iris (.rgb)
  • Portable Network Graphics (.png)
  • JPEG (.jpg)
  • JPEG 2000 (jp2)
  • TGA Thundervision (.tga)
  • Cineon (.cin)
  • DPX (.dpx)
  • MultiLayer and OpenEXR (.exr)
  • HDRI (.hdr)
  • Tagged Image File Format (.tiff)

• Video
  • Audio Video Interleave (.avi)
  • H.264 (.mp4)
  • MPEG-1 (.mpg)
  • MPEG-2 (DVD)
  • MPEG-4 (.mp4)
  • Theora (.ogg,.ogv)
  • XviD (.mpg)

It is possible to create animated images, such as animated GIFs, using Blender in conjunction with GIMP. Create frames of animation and then put them together in sequence, using the GIMP, and save as a single file.

Three-dimensional formats

Blender supports other 3D models, both for import (designs open for editing), and for export (models that can be opened by other programs). Through 'scripts', it is possible to export/import from other formats that are not officially supported. In addition to the standard format, the following three-dimensional model formats are also supported:

• 3ds Max (.3ds)
• AC3D (.ac)
• Autodesk Drawing eXchange Format (.dxf)
• Autodesk FBX (.fbx)
• Autodesk Softimage (.xsi)
• Cal3D (cfg,.xaf,.xmf,.xrf,.xsf)
• COLLADA 1.3.1 and 1.4 (.dae)
• DEC Object File Format (.off)
• DirectX (.x)
• LightWave (.lwo)
• LightWave Motion (.mot)
• Mobile 3D Graphics API (.m3g,.java)
• MD2 (md2)
• MDD (.mdd)
• MilkShape 3D (.ms3d,.txt)
• Motion Capture (.bvh)
• OpenFlight (.flt)
• OpenInventor (.iv)
• Paths (from 2D to 3D, em form of linha) (.svg,.ps,eps,.ai,gimp)
• Pro Engineer (.slp)
• Quake 3 (.map)
• Radiosity (radio)
• Raw Image File (.raw)
• Stanford PLY (.ply)
• STL (.stl)
• TrueSpace (.cob)
• VideoScape (.stl)
• VRML 1.0 and VRML97 (ou VRML 2.0) (.wrl)
• Wavefront OBJ (.obj)
• Extensible 3D X3D (.x3d)
• xfig export (.fig)

Projects using Blender

Today many professionals use Blender, as well as some professional projects, including commercial animations, created using Blender in whole or in part. The first major professional project using Blender was the movie Spider-Man 2, which was first used to create animations and previews. Blender has already been used to create businesses in various parts of the world such as Sydney, Australia, and Brazil.

Blender competes with commercial programs such as 3ds Max, CINEMA 4D, LightWave, Maya, Rhino3D, Autodesk Softimage and ZBrush. Blender has many of the tools that commercial competitors have.

Elephants Dream / Orange Project

Corto Elephants Dream

Elephants Dream, originally titled Project Orange, is an animation created using Blender and other free programs, with the aim of popularizing the use of free programs, and demonstrating that there are good free programs for various purposes. In September 2005, some of Blender's most notable artists and developers began working on the movie, using free software, an initiative known primarily as the Orange Open Movie Project. The resulting film, Elephants Dream, was shown on March 24, 2006. Elephants Dream was the world's first free software animation.

Down jackets

Plumíferos is an animation made on a computer from Argentina, the first commercial animation that was developed entirely in free software, PlumiBlender, a modified version of Blender.

Cartel Big buck bunny

Big Buck Bunny / Peach Project

Big Buck Bunny, originally titled Project Peach, is the second animation created by the Blender Foundation and the first to be created at the new Blender Institute studio. Unlike the first Blender Foundation animation, the creators Peach promised to make it fun, and not just as a showcase of Blender's capabilities. The film was produced with the support of donations and pre-sale of the DVD. It was released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Yo Frankie! / Apricot Project

Yo Frankie!, Originally titled Project Apricot is a free game, based on the graphic animation Big Buck Bunny. In it, the player controls Frankie, a squirrel. The game had its characters, settings and logic created in Blender and real-time rendering was done in the Crystal Space engine, using an automated script, called blender2crystal, which exports all content to Crystal Space. it was split into two versions, one fully implemented in Blender, and the other in Crystal Space.

Sintel / Durian Project

Sintel initially titled Project Durian, announced on May 8, 2009, is the new free short from the Blender Institute, planned to start production on September 1, 2009, and finished in August/September 2010. Its target audience planned are teenagers, with the theme of fantasy and epic action. Its protagonist is a young heroine named Sintel. The Sintel trailer was released on May 13, 2010 and can be viewed online on the official entertainment site. [42] The film was released on September 27, 2010 at the Netherlands Film Festival and online on September 30, 2010.

Tears of Steel Cartel

Tears of Steel / Mango Project

Tears of Steel, initially titled Project Mango, was announced on October 1, 2011 on the official Mango website. Project was the first live-action open movie Blender project made using the Cycles rendering engine, present since the version 2.61 of the program. Filming began on May 7, 2012, and the film was released on September 26 of the same year. The film is set in an alternate future in Amsterdam, where a group of scientists try to relive a key event in the past to prevent the world from being destroyed by robots. There is not much information, as in other Blender projects, about the film's setting and about the universe in which the characters live, and therefore most of the film depends on the viewer's interpretation. On May 15, 2013, the filmmakers released all content used in the film under a Creative Commons license. The film was also notable for being the first of the Open Movies to use a camera tracking system in which real actors interact with virtual objects, a feature recently implemented in Blender 2.61 and improved in later versions.

Cosmos Laundromat / Project Gooseberry

On January 10, 2011, Ton Roosendaal announced that the fifth open film project would be codenamed "Gooseberry" and that his goal would be to produce an animated feature film. Production was speculated to begin sometime between 2012 and 2014. The film is written and produced by a coalition of international animation studios. The formation of the studio was announced on January 28, 2014, with the cooperation of studios from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, Spain, the United States, India, and Indonesia, among others, and production began shortly thereafter. By March 2014, the moodboard had been created and development goals were set.

Sabogal

Sabogal (2015) is a judicial thriller in 13 chapters that, between animation and archive images, immerses us in the tireless fight of a brave man to find the truth. It is directed by Juan José Lozano and Sergio Mejía; Produced by Liliana Rincón. A 3da2 Animation Studios Production for Canal Capital and Financed by ANTV. It is a hybrid format, a pioneer in public television in Colombia with strong influences from the formal and narrative codes of comics and crime novels, which mix animated images with archive images. For 8 months, more than 140 people worked to bring this project to the small screen. Motion capture was used for its realization. Blender was used for the modeling, rigging and animation processes.

Spring

On April 4, 2019, the animated short Spring, produced by the Blender Institute animation studio, premiered. Written and directed by Andy Goralczyk, its objective was to test the capabilities of the version 2.80 of Blender before making it officially public. The story is about a shepherd girl and her dog facing off against ancestral spirits in order to continue the cycle of life.

Online services

Blender Cloud

The Blender Cloud platform was launched in March 2014 by the Blender Institute, it is a subscription-based cloud computing platform and an extension to the Blender tool that provides storage and synchronization for support animation projects. Launched to promote and raise funds for the "Project Gooseberry" project, and with the intention of replacing the sale of the Blender software in DVD format, to do so with a model based on in subscription that allows file hosting, resource sharing and collaboration.

A feature of Blender Cloud is Blender Sync, which provides synchronization of file changes, user preferences, and the like between Blender clients.

Blender ID

It is a feature that provides a unified log in for all Blender software tools and services, including Blender Cloud, Blender Store, Blender Conference, Blender Network, Blender Development Fun and Blender Foundation Certified Training Program.

Other fields

The Blender community has created numerous Add-ons that simplify its use in areas other than 3D animation, such as architecture, 3D printing or the Dental industry. This has allowed the creation of sub-communities that are constantly developing these tools.